


Post Traumatic Something or Other

by objectlesson



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: First Time, Humor, M/M, Matt is super over analytical over everything, Matt proves him wrong, McClane thinks he's more of an old man than he is, Mental Instability, Serious UST, bed sharing, room mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:46:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt is pretty sure he's going crazy. There's no other explanation for his huge hard-on for John McClane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Post Traumatic Something or Other

**Author's Note:**

  * For [persnickett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/gifts).



> Oh man. I don't know what happened. I thought I would do one fic in this pairing just so I could say that I could, and then I ended up creating this monster fic. This is the longest story I've ever written outside the AFI fandom. EVER. And I have a lot of fandoms. I blame Justin Long for being too cute. 
> 
> Anyway, this is ridiculous. I don't have much to say about it, aside from an apology to anyone who loves the field of psychology, because Matt bastardizes it here. I'm a psychology student, and know my shit, so his narrative is infused with that knowledge, but is also tainted by his general paranoia and mistrust towards the worlds, so know that all mistakes and cruelty are his and not mine. If anyone wants an outline of the real psychological basis that this fic is founded on, I can provide you with an outline. All you gotta do is ask. 
> 
> Oh, and this story is for Persnickett, who is to blame for how large this became. :)
> 
> I don't own them.

Matt hates the entire institution of psychology. It’s a bad institution. It’s been used for, like, centuries to oppress people of color and keep gays out of the military. It has a long, bloody history of lobotomies, electro shock therapy, sexism and psychoanalytic bullshit. There even used to be this guy, (Matt can’t remember his name or anything, but he sure as hell was evil,) who drove around in what he called the Lobotobus or the Lobotomobile or something equally trendy, so he could misdiagnose anyone who had a nosebleed or a bad day with psychosis and then drag the poor sap into the back seat to scramble up his frontal lobe. Yep, psychology is fucked up. A bad institution. 

Matt doesn’t trust anyone, but psychologists are near the top of his hypothetical list of least trustworthy fuckers on the planet. Even now, people might not have lobotobuses, but they have drugs. Matt doesn’t trust drugs. He’s pretty sure there are about ten million better cures out there in the world for mental illness, but the funding goes to the drug companies, so that’s where the research is. These chemistry experiments being conducted in innocent people’s brains. 

Matt doesn’t think the psychologists know what the drugs will do, but they prescribe them anyway, to see what will happen. Because it’s the easy fix, treat the symptom rather than the actual problem. Much easier than therapy, (not that there’s any convincing proof _that_ shit works, either). ADHD? There’s a drug for that. PTSD? There’s a drug for that. MD? DID? BDD? Drugs all around, in a bowl on the counter between the peanut M &Ms and the onion dip. We’re not sure if it will help, but we are sure your libido will drop and you’ll gain weight.

Matt thinks the psychologists (or at least the drug companies) just want one big, Prozac nation all doped up on dick-softening, brain-jellifying drugs. That makes more sense than people actually wanting to help people. Yep. Psychology sucks. Not to be trusted. He didn’t pay attention to Psych 101 his first (and last) semester of college. He sat in the back with his laptop (probably working on the project that got him expelled, actually), thinking about what a huge load of corporate-run bullshit the whole scene was. 

Now, he is kind of wishing he had taken some notes. There was probably some neat, textbook explanation for the phenomenon he is currently experiencing. There was probably a name for it. He would appreciate a name for it. If there is a _name_ , maybe he can just name it and cut it out of himself, lock it up in a little jar of fromalin to label for forget about. Stash it in the medicine cabinet next to the Ritalin he was prescribed when he was seventeen but never took, because psychology is evil and he was not going to be just another gear in that corrupt system. If he could _name_ it, then maybe it’s a thing outside of him, instead of a part of him. 

Matt doesn’t want to admit that this is a part of him. That would mean so many more shitty, inconvenient things than if he just had another acronym tacked onto his name next to the (most likely misdiagnosed) ADHD. ADHD and PTWFF. Which, of course, stands for Post Traumatic Warm Fuzzy Feelings. 

Not that anything within the ten foot radius of John McClane could be classified as Warm and Fuzzy. That’s probably not it. Maybe something closer to Post Traumatic Sexuality and Identity Crisis. PTSIC. That even sounds professional. If Matt had actually _read_ the part of his text book on the Diagnostic Manual of Crazy Person Stuff or whatever it was called in psych 101, then maybe he would know what this disorder really is. What the real acronym is. 

But he didn’t. He wrote algorithms for a criminal mastermind that eventually got him nearly blown up. And now, he can’t diagnose himself and his bizarre, distracting, completely impossible fixation on John McClane. 

Matt’s a smart kid. He knows it probably makes some kind of complicated psychological sense, that he has these stupid feelings. Something about McClane saving his life a million times. Something about McClane taking charge for him, killing for him, nearly dying for him. Something about being vulnerable and sobby and hungry in front of McClane, something about sharing sweat and blood. It probably made sense, on some level. That after all that shit is over, a guy gets confused about all the feelings he’s left with. 

At first, he thinks it’s about Lucy. After all, she’s the right age. Before college, he would have thought she was the right sex, too, because he was still under the very wrong impression that he only liked girls. Comicon, a drunken blowjob, and two very informative albeit sleepless nights the weekend after the flash animation panel two summers ago changed that. But still. Cute anime cosplayers at a convention are one thing. Gunslinging, world-saving, psycho-cops are another. Not even just another _thing_. Another fucking _species_. Matt is jacking off to an _alien_. 

_Anyway_. It’s not about Lucy. That would be convenient, but unfortunately, Matt’s appreciation for McClane’s daughter sustained itself for about as long as it took for him to realize that he was only into her because she was the attainable part of her dad. Then it curled up and died, leaving him here, sporting a boner for a belligerent balding guy old enough to be his father. It’s completely unfair. Matt doesn’t want it to be coming from him. He wants it to belong to psychology, to glass jars and bloody histories and the DSM. He wants an acronym. 

Instead, what he has is a recently exploded apartment, and the FBI’s impending decision on whether to incarcerate him, or hire him. 

He could stay in a motel and live off ramen for a few months, until they figure out what to do with his sorry ass. Or, he could disappear. Catch the next flight to Mozambique and smash his laptop. Learn to hunt. Live off the earth. Or, he could do these things in a universe where he actually possessed cash to pay for a room, microwaved food, or a plane ticket. If the feds didn’t have everything monitored so securely, maybe he could wire himself some money from some deserving bank or maybe the fucking drug companies, but they have him virtually locked up. 

He could also sleep in a cardboard box in a gutter. 

Or, he could take John McClane up on his offer, and graciously take the couch. Cardboard box vs couch. What a toss up. 

\---

McClane comes to pick him up with a gun in his belt. He’s clean, which seems strange. Matt is hoping that when he sees him, he won’t get sick to his stomach, but it is a prayer unanswered, and McClane’s scowling face and broad chest cause his body to begin a self-destruct sequence as expected. He doesn’t know _why,_ but he wants him. Or, more specifically, he wants to be crushed underneath him. It seems like a safe place to be. Matt would never say it out loud, but part of him has always wanted to be safe, and not just the part of him that came to life after he started doing illegal shit. 

See, the whole fire-sale, world-ending business kind of fucked up Matt’s life. It left him feeling even more broke and more paranoid than he had been _before_ the incident, and he had already been a very broke and very paranoid kid. He’s jumpy and depressed now. He sidesteps around corners, worried someone might try to kick his teeth in if he’s not on guard. He has a huge, still-healing hole in his knee where some bastard _shot_ him. He’s been _shot_. He’s still having nightmares about it. This is probably another acronym. This is probably PTSD. Matt would know if he paid attention, but he didn’t. 

“Are you gonna get in the car, Ferrall?” McClane barks. 

Matt realizes he has been just standing there on the curb of his friend’s house like some middle-schooler, waiting for his parents to pick him up, staring at McClane. He clears his throat. “I’m debating it. Kinda considering the possibility that I might get shot again if I climb into your car. Seeing as the, um, last time you and I were together, I got a hole blown into my knee. Wondering if my body can take the stress.” 

McClane’s face stays dark, and he makes a noise in his throat. “Hell. You don’t have to be my charity case if you don’t want to.” 

“No! No,” Matt wheezes, stepping towards the window, which is rolled down. He can’t smell McClane, not yet. Or maybe he doesn’t know the way McClane actually smells, his smell free of fear-sweat and asphalt and iron. He rubs his eyes, not believing that he he actually thinking about John McClane’s _smell_. He wonders if he can actually stay with him without going crazy. “I was joking. I’m actually, uh, really thankful. That you’re putting me up, I mean. And it’s okay if I get shot again. I’m still thankful.” Matt’s voice gets all weird and high and reedy, and he swallows. Silence meets him, until he sees McClane smile, the darkness breaking across his face. 

McClane reaches out the window, claps a rough hand down on Matt’s shoulder. “No problem, kid. I guess I sorta owe you one, too. For Lucy.” 

McClane’s hand hurts, feels electric, and Matt nearly buckles under the weight of it like a bendy straw. “Ah, yeah. Wow. You’re doing the bro-shoulder greeting. It feels, um, awesome on my recently injured back,” he says, but he’s smiling, his cheeks flushing. Things feel like they did. Safe. He feels safe again. He tosses his bangs out off his brow, relieved. 

“I see you still complain a shitload.” 

“I see you still curse a shitload.” 

“Speaking of loads of shit, my trunk latch is broken, so any luggage you got has to fit in the back seat,” McClane says, gesturing behind him with his thumb. “Anything you can shove in there, be my guest.” 

Matt lugs his new computer console, laptop, and trashbag full of clothes into the backseat. McClane only rolls his eyes a little bit at all the wires and screens. “More gadgets? Don’t you have any normal possessions?” 

“Normal? Like what?” Matt asks, panting. He’s thrilled to be in this car again, thrilled to be beside McClane again, even though he _knows_ it’s all absurd. That it can’t be real. That it _has_ to be the work of some bullshit psychology, some Post Traumatic School-Boy Crush Reversion. That has to be it. “Also, remember, my apartment kind of blew up.” 

He hauls himself into the car, shuts the door, relaxes against the seat-back and studies McClane’s well-lined face in the rearview mirror, only to find that he is being studied back. He can only see McClane’s eyes but he thinks that he’s smiling. He smiles back.    
“Well, if those are all your worldly possessions, I guess I’m turning around,” McClane eventually sighs, shaking his head. “I can’t believe I got stuck babysitting you again,” he grumbles, but there’s fondness in his voice, a thread of gold hidden in seas of black. Or at least, Matt hopes there is. 

\---

The drive is two hours long, and McClane has contributed roughly one sixteenth of the conversation. Matt feels like an asshole, talking so much, but he hasn’t been able to tell anyone about the shit that happened to him in DC. Anyway, even if he could, he’s not sure he wants to talk about it with some layman, some friend of his who’s lived his life stuck behind a console. McClane is the only person on earth who can possibly comprehend it all. The blood, the nervousness. The ringing in his ears, the all-body soreness, the insomnia, the loneliness. 

He’s felt like the only guy in the world ever since this mess ended, the only guy, lost out at sea looking for something to anchor to. Lucy had seemed like the best place to go. And he tried that, but it didn’t work. Outside being hostages, they had nothing in common. And it’s not like Matt has much more in common with McClane. He _knows_ this is ridiculous, he _knows_ he wouldn’t feel this way had he not met the guy in a completely traumatic situation. He _knows_ there’s nothing real about it, that if the potential at smearing salve on his loneliness becomes a reality, like it did with Lucy, that it will evaporate just at quickly. He knows. _Still_ , the words are coming fast. He wants to talk about it, he wants to know it happened, and that John McClane was there for all of it, that John McClane is here again. 

“Kid, do you ever shut up?” McClane finally asks, looking over his shoulder at Matt with his brows knit together in disbelief. “You’re like this fucking toy Lucy had when she was a kid. God, what was it called. Ugly mother. A gremlin or something. Never shut up, I eventually had to take the battery pack out. Cue the waterworks.” 

“A Furby,” Matt answers automatically, even though he had just vowed to start practicing the art of silence or at least selectiveness. “I had one too. Still probably would have it, if you hadn’t incinerated my apartment. It was a collectors item. Or, at least it was going to be in a few years.” 

McClane is quiet for a few moments, then shakes his head. “You had one too? Jesus Christ I am old. I guess that makes you and Lucy around the same age.” 

“Yeah. Around,” Matt says, wanting Lucy to stop being in the conversation. He coughs as he tries to change the subject, remembering silence. Selectiveness. 

They drive a few miles before McClane breaks the tense quiet. “So. My daughter,” is what he says. 

Matt’s stomach drops, and his hands get cold. He doesn’t think that McClane is above hitting him, at all. In fact, he’s pretty sure than if he responds to the impending interrogation in the wrong way, he might get decked in the face at best, thrown out of the car before being repeatedly driven over at worst. “What about her?” he responds very carefully. 

“She told me you stopped returning her phone calls.” McClane’s voice is so even and stoic that it’s unreadable. There’s bait, lying somewhere in there, and Matt’s sure he’s supposed to take it, and most likely get beaten up. Maybe that’s what all this is. A ploy for McClane to kill him under the guise of taking him in. 

“It was, uh, a weird period of my life. Seemed like a bad time to be getting in a relationship with someone...I mean who knows. What life-threatening, knee-shooting, apartment-exploding situations do to a guy. I probably could have been more, um...professional? Gentlemanly? But I was too busy trying to pick up the pieces of my life to really worry about all that. So, uh. sorry.” It is a bad way to put everything, but it’s at least kind of true. He only leaves out the part that would have gone _I also realized it was you I wanted to fuck._

Matt winces as McClane stares at him. It’s not an accusing kind of stare, just a stare. He nods slowly. “You could have called her.” 

“Yeah, like I said. I wasn’t...still am not...all together. Probably not good boyfriend material.” 

McClane shrugs, eyes back on the road, which is a much less unnerving place for them to be. “You weren’t right for her anyway.” 

“Yeah,” Matt agrees. “She wasn’t right for me either.” 

And McClane’s back to staring at him. “Hey now. That’s my pride and joy you’re talking about.” 

Matt holds up his hands. “I don’t get you, you like, hate me if I try and date her, hate me if I try and break up with her. Can’t win with you. I’m glad I’m not your daughter, geez.” 

“I don’t hate you, kid,” McClane says, gruff. “Plus, I’m just trying to make conversation. Catch up with you.” The car swerves a little, and Matt attributes the sick little twist in his gut to that, rather than whatever McClane is saying. 

“I’d appreciate it if you watched the road. Its creeping me out how straight you can drive without watching it. You’re like robo-cop, man. At least pretend you’re a human.” Matt actually doesn’t care if McClane is looking where he’s going or not; he still feels safer in his car then he’s felt in a long time. This banter, this tension, this uncertainty as to whether or not McClane likes him or is just tolerating him; it’s all familiar. Safe. 

McClane takes his time cutting his eyes back to gaze beyond the windshield. They’re both quiet for a long time. Silent. Selective. 

It’s McClane who eventually says something, voice low and stinging like a scrape. “Hey Ferrel.” 

“Yeah?” Matt says, rousing himself from his state of reverie against the passenger window. 

“I’m glad you’re not my daughter too.” 

\---

Matt is so bad at maintaining homeostasis. It’s like his basic biological functions are broken. He can’t breathe, and he can’t stay warm, so he’s on the couch in a sleeping bag McClane got out of the basement which smells like mildew and old cigarettes, shivering like he’s fucking naked in the arctic. He’s even wearing _socks_. It makes no sense. Normal people can stay warm when they’re in sleeping bags in heated houses. Matt cannot. 

It probably is because there’s a serious psychological problem going on with him. It’s probably psychosomatic, this weird, pervasive coldness. He’s probably imagining it, because his subconscious badly wants some reason to go knock on the door to McClane’s bedroom, and continue talking to him. Be close to him. Stay safe, and as a result, warm. 

Matt knows how completely out of line that is. 

In fact, he can’t think of anything that will make the weird and obvious age gap even weirder and more obvious than him shuffling up to McClane’s bedroom asking for a blanket. Maybe if he had a pacifier, that would make it worse. But he doesn’t. All he has is this smelly, deflated sleeping bag and very, very cold feet. Matt never wears socks to bed as a rule, but he decides to break that rule tonight, lest he turn into an ice cube in his sleep and die. 

It’s an absurd eight thirty at night. _Eight thirty_ , who the fuck goes to bed at eight thirty? Matt usually has second dinner at eight thirty, not sleep. But John McClane is not human. He can’t be. After they get back to his apartment and stumble out of the car aching and exhausted, there is no first dinner, let alone second dinner. There is McClane’s grand tour (which involves pointing at each room with a vague, noncommittal gesture rather than actually _walking_ to them), and an offer to consume whatever was in the fridge (though Matt highly doubts it’s a genuine offer). Matt pisses in the bathroom. Snoops in the ancient looking medicine cabinet (razor, shaving cream, ibuprofen, rust, nothing else). Emerges, hands shoved in his pockets, still very aware that he might be making an incredible mistake. 

McClane didn’t look at him. He looks at the scuffed up linoleum in the kitchen, rubs the back of his neck. “Alright kid. I’m gonna hit the sack. If you need anything, holler, but really, it would just be better if you didn’t need anything.” 

Matt tries not to look incredulous. He really does. But it’s _eight thirty_. His eyes widen, and he blurts, “You’re going to _bed?”_

“I just drove four hours round trip to rescue you from some maggot hacker basement. I have work in the morning. So, yes. I’m going to bed.” 

“What, you turn into a pumpkin if you miss your bedtime? Need your beauty sleep?” Matt is looking in the fridge, which houses beer, and lunch meat with a dubious expiration date. Matt holds it up. “Bachelor padding it, I see. Trying to poison yourself to end the loneliness? Or, um, trying to poison your house guests?” 

“There’s arsenic-free cereal in the cabinet above the stove,” is McClane’s answer, shouted over a retreating shoulder. “Good night, Ferrall.” 

“Arsenic free. Awesome.” Matt mumbles.

And that is how he ends up here, in the polar regions of John McClane’s living room, trying to generate heat between his ice-block feet as he rubbs them together. His teeth chattering, his fingers shaking, he tries to do some mindless, easy programming. But he keeps messing up the details, typing sixes instead of carrots, commas and periods instead of less than and greater than signs. It’s hard to write html when you’re slowly dying of hypothermia. 

He lets his mind wander to the mental illness he probably has. Post Traumatic Something or Other. He imagines the gloriously violent end he would come to if he were to tell McClane about it. Or, worse, if he were to _not_ tell McClane about it and instead, just grab him by his fucking gun belt. Unbuckle his pants, slide his hand inside. _What are you_ doing, _kid?_ he hears in his head, before he hears the sound of his own bones crushing to a bloody dust. 

Rubbing a hand over his face, eyes stinging with the laptop glow, Matt begrudgingly exits out of the programming, and pulls up an internet window. He gets past McClane’s security no problem, sneaks past the wi-fi code, and googles _sexual attraction as a result of traumatic experiences_. 

He reads, even though he knows diagnosing oneself on the internet is never a good idea. But hell, maybe it’s more trustworthy than going to a shrink. A computer is not going to prescribe you drugs that mess with the neurotransmitters in your brain. “Fuck,” Matt mutters to no one, because he can’t believe how ridiculous it is that he wants to fuck John McClane enough, _thinks about it enough_ , that he’s _googling it_. “You’re in grossly deep,” he tells himself, chewing in his lower lip. 

Apparently, it’s normal. To want to fuck someone who saves your life in a big clusterfuck of bullets and secret agents and criminal hackers and more bullets. It’s even normal to want to fuck someone who is just _present with you_ in a big clusterfuck of bullets and secret agents and criminal hackers and more bullets. In fact, it’s miraculous that Matt isn’t, like, _in love_ with McClane given how normal it is, and given the frequency with which McClane was not only present with him in a clusterfuck, but saving him from a clusterfuck. And given that there were multiple clusterfucks. Matt is beginning to think he got off easy. He’s at least forty-seven percent sure he’s not in love with John McClane. Forty-seven percent is a significant minority. It’s not to be ignored. 

So he’s normal. For a trauma survivor or whatever. This is is both comforting and unsettling; Matt is always suspicious of normalcy, but he’s also relieved there’s not something seriously wrong with him. Saves him that trip to the shrink to get libido-lowerers and weight-gainers. He keeps rubbing his face, reading on that although it’s normal to form bonds and relationships and sexual intimacy with individuals who shared the traumatic experience with you, they don’t usually last. Nor are they healthy. Matt is not particularly phased by this; it’s not like he actually thinks that his Post Traumatic Sexual Obsession Problem is going to go anywhere besides his own hand and his own shower drain (which is now, ironically, McClane’s shower drain). He’s not under any illusions that he’s going to get laid, or loved, or even survive it. It’s enough that he’s here on this couch. 

Also, Matt can’t even maintain homeostasis. It’s not like he’s worried about staying _healthy_. Matt isn’t healthy to begin with. Hasn’t been for years. Practically his whole life. 

___

Matt falls asleep at four am. He wakes up an hour and a half later to the gurgling of a coffee machine, and John McClane’s voice _shouting_ “Jesus kid, glad to see you’re still alive. They shut off the heat in the middle of the night. That, or the radiator’s busted. It does that sometimes. Kinda worried I’d come out here to a corpse on my couch.” 

“You know, it’ still dark outside,” Matt wheezes, kicking his sleeping back off accidentally, the breath knocking out of him as the cold air hits like a fist. “Most people, people like me, um, wish they had never been born if they get woken up when it’s still dark. That’s like, when the vampires and the corporate business men walk the streets. It’s witching hour.” 

“Huh,” McClane barks, sounding positively _cheery_ in comparison to his grumbling angry old man number he played past night. “Guess I’m among the undead, then. Better get used to it, kid, because this is my rise and shine time.” 

“I think we might be the least compatible room mates in the history of forever. I think I should just eat the lunch meat,” Matt’s voice is climbing to that weird, nearly hysterical octave it climbs to sometimes. He coughs, trying to knock the keening note out of his words so he sounds a little older than fourteen and a half. 

“Well. You got no choice if you want a place to stay.” 

Matt takes a deep breath, trying to organize his very disorganized thoughts. “I’m not complaining, really. Like, seriously, I am so thrilled I’m on this couch. I just use negativity as a coping mechanism for witching hour, uh, it’s nothing personal. I also _did_ nearly freeze to death last night, so there’s that. The frostbite, I mean.” 

This entire conversation has been shouted across the divide between living room and kitchen, and only now does McClane stride over into Matt’s line of visibility. He’s showered, a bright thing in the dark living room, and Matt squirms as he looks at him. “If you’re going to go back to sleep, which I assume you are because you’re a nocturnal rodent, you can hop in my bed to warm up. Should be better than this fuckin’ drafty room.” He shrugs on a jacket, grabs a beanie off the the top of the TV, shakes it free of dust before he jams is onto this head. 

Matt must not be computing at maximum efficiency or something. Witching hour. So he holds up his hand, eyebrows quirked into very acute parabolas. “Wait. Did you just offer me _your bed_? As in, you’re willing to let my body, _between your sheets_? That is some very serious hospitality, are you sure--”

McClane grimaces. “Way to make it sound weird, kid.” 

“Not weird. Just surprised. I figured you for the kind of guy who padlocks his door at night. Keeps a handgun under his pillow or something. Sleeps on a board, military style.” Matt’s words come curt and fast, his half-asleep wheeze and bleariness gone with this new, remarkable development in his sleeping arrangement. He’s been dreaming of warmth all night. Specifically, warmth generated by John McClane. It doesn’t seem like real life now that he’s been offered that, even if it’s some weird variation on it rather than the version he’s been entertaining. 

They stare at each other until McClane’s mouth breaks into a lazy smile. Not what Matt is expecting, but nice. His eyebrows stay in their parabolic functions, but he tries to smile back. 

“No board. It’s a bed. And I’m not going to be in it for the next nine hours, so you might as well be. Go for it.” He unchains his door, shoots a glance behind him towards Matt, jumbled and freezing on his couch, bedded down in green, moth-eaten sleeping bag. “Don’t blow up anything,” he says, and then he’s gone. 

Matt hovers, wondering if he fashioned this scenario in his state of partial awareness and when McClane comes home in nine hours (nine hours which Matt will inevitably sleep through) and finds a body in his bed, he will annihilate said body for invading his padlocked, hand-gun-under-the-pillow room. He hovers for around 3.69 seconds, until he remembers that he is probably going to die very soon of hypothermia _anyway,_ so he might as well spend the last nine hours of his miserable existence in the bed of the dude he wants to fuck. 

Padding across the cold linoleum to McClane’s bedroom door, which is battered and ajar, Matt tries hard to curse himself. To think about how fucked up he is, how he’s behaving in a pretty typical fashion for a damsel in distress, a pretty typical fashion for a some kid who’s lived through a bunch of terrorists trying to _kill_ him, who’s been repeatedly saved by an oddly charming, handsome, older butch guy who looks really good covered in blood. How he should be ashamed of himself for behaving in a typical fashion.

But Matt’s too tired. He hasn’t slept well since he helped saved the world, and in those hours awake, yearning, alone, and terrified, there’s something he wants. He opens McClane’s door, and takes the one part of that thing he wants he can have without the threat of bloodshed and lost teeth. 

McClane’s bedroom isn’t exactly what Matt imagined it to be. He thought McClane would be a meticulous type of guy, with few possessions and those he did have in order. Instead, McClane’s room is strewn with shit. Dirty laundry, books. _Books_. Matt hadn’t seen those coming. There’s no desk, but the dresser has a coffee can full of pens and highlighters on top of it and messy stacks of papers. Newspapers, photocopies, police reports. Probably confidential things Matt isn’t supposed to look at, which meant that later, when he’s not eager to fall back asleep so his heart will stop trying to kill itself against the inside of his ribs, he'll be flipping through them. Invading privacy is Matt’s job; he’s good at it and he stopped feeling guilty a long time ago. If he stopped feeling guilty for snooping, it seems probable that he could cease feeling guilty about responding to trauma in a typical fashion. And wanting to fuck his new room mate slash landlord slash whatever the fuck line they were toeing now that he was crashing on John McClane’s couch. 

True to his word, McClane evidently sleeps on a bed, not a board. It’s a saggy looking queen sized bed, with grey sheets and a ratted comforter hanging out on the foot of it. Matt suddenly feels weird, standing here, cataloguing the color of McClane’s sheets. He’s exhausted, sore all over, and the two hours of sleep he _had_ managed to catch were nightmare-riddled and restless. He tries not to think anymore, and crawls into McClane’s bed. 

_Finally_ , he thinks, inhaling. He can smell him here. His sweat, the dark, familiar sting of it between the laundry detergent, sleep, and aftershave smell, what he’s been trying to recapture, what he’s been longing for so obviously and uncomoplicatedly since the fire-sale that he can’t ignore what it means without failing to live up to his impressive IQ. Here is where he wants to be. Preferably next to the actual McClane rather than just his ghost -scent, but this is fine. 

Matt inhales, and feels his chest quiet. And here, he can’t pretend anymore that something isn’t wrong. That he’s acting more paranoid, more skittish and mistrustful that usual. That he’s lonelier than usual. That his body hurts all the time, that he can’t sleep, that he’s afraid of things he never used to be afraid of. That he wants it to go away, and that he’s been thinking (even though he knows it’s impossible, that it won’t work) that John McClane is the one who can do it. Because he saved him once, he can save him again. 

He’s so close to sleeping he almost doesn’t even realize that he’s hard in his boxer shorts, that he’s been subconsciously grinding down on the mattress like a humping dog for the last few minutes. _Oh_ , he thinks. _Whoops. Probably weird_. He wills it to go away. It won’t. 

Rubbings his face against the pillow with eyes burning and wet, Matt acknowledges that he probably is fucked up after all. Then he falls asleep. 

___

This time, Matt wakes up to the door slamming. He freaks out for a minute, trying to remember where the hell he is, why this bed is so large and smells so good, why he feels warm and safe and well-rested when he’d kind of given up on ever feeling those three things ever again. 

“Ferrall? You still unconscious?” McClane shouts, and quite suddenly, Matt remembers it all. He sits bolt upright, throwing the covers off of him and stumbling out of bed, the light filtering through the shitty, boarded up window in the kitchen hitting him while he’s still stuck in the hallway. “No. Nope. Awake, very awake,” he calls, voice hoarse. 

“Right. You sound like it.” 

“I always sound like that. I have a naturally gravelly voice, it’s part of why I’m so popular with women,” Matt says automatically, one of his predictable childhood responses to being teased about his perpetually squeakiness. He clears his throat, collapses at the round metal table in McClane’s kitchen. “I think your bed is magical. I haven’t slept like that since...well, actually, since I met you.” 

McClane chooses to not respond directly to Matt on the topic of his bed and its potential magic. “I got you some food. Since you insulted my lunch meat.” He slaps a bag groceries down onto the table in front of Matt, who very warily peeks inside, eyes still sticky from being recently awoken. 

“Oh. Canned things stewed in ketchup. My favorite,” he announces, unearthing baked beans, Spaghetti-Os, and Chef Boyardee. 

“You do the shopping next time, then, houseboy,” McClane snarls, with no real anger behind it. Most of all, he seems amused by Matt, like everything he says is exasperatingly funny instead of reeking of social awkwardness and borderline albeit unintentional rudeness. But not nice funny. The kind of funny you make fun of, tell your coworkers about. _Guess what boywonder said tonight, guys._

“I wan’t being ironic. I really, really love canned things stewed in ketchup. I’m not exactly a chef or anything. If it can be put in a bowl which in turn can get put in a microwave, it’s my favorite.”

“See, we’re not all that incompatible,” McClane quips, reaching across the table to rough his hand through Matt’s hair. 

“Whoa,” Matt says, alarmed, and ducks out from under the hand. He obviously _wants_ it there, wants to be touched by McClanes big, rough hands, but not when he’s just woken up and they’re shooting out of the air towards him. This is more than his little heart can handle. “You’re cuddly for a guy who just left a police station.” 

McClane looks at him weird, like it wasn’t the response he thought he would get out of touching Matt. Or maybe he hadn’t been expecting a response at all, and Matt’s glaringly awkward ability to draw attention to things that aren’t weird and hence negating their not weirdness and making them weird makes things weird. He laughs nervously, and McClane shakes his head. 

“You’re like a different species,” he tells him. “Kinda want to study you.”   
Matt’s heart clenches, a tight, painful clench that cuts off his airway for a second. He tries not to choke. Something is clearly wrong with him, because he doubts that any other human in the world could read romance into things that John McClane says. “I, um, often think that about you. The different species thing, not the launching empirical research thing.” 

McClane nods, raising his eyebrows. “Ah.” he stands up, unbuckling his holster (is what what they’re called? Matt doesn’t even know what they’re called.) “You want me to nuke some canned thing stewed in ketchup.” 

“Uh, yeah. That would be great.” Matt sits at the table, feeling ten years old and distantly in trouble. He presses the pads of his fingers together, trying to think of what to say. After a moment of listening to the microwave hum together in amiable quiet, Matt asks, “So, um. How was work?” 

McClane shoots him a look over his shoulder, brow furrowed. “What, are you my wife? Am I gonna have to be answering stupid small talk questions from you, or are we past that stage?” 

Matt is startled, but it’s not a bad feeling. There’s that weird elation under everything, too. He clears his throat, eyes wide. “Definitely, definitely past it. I um, just wasn’t sure if you were ready to launch into a conversation about the practical application of string theory. Seeing as you just got off work and everything,” Matt says. McClane stares at him, very slowly stirring a steaming bowl of Spaghetti O’s. There’s a pause. That pause multiplies. Matt clears his throat again, more carefully this time. “I was. You know, kidding.” 

McClane nods, as slowly as he is stirring. He sets the bowl down in front of Matt, making him feel even stupider and younger than he already feels. “Got it. Hmm. That one goes down on the log books.” 

“For your empirical research?” 

“Yup.”

___

That evening, (if five can be considered evening, sometimes Matt is still brewing his coffee and reading his morning’ emails by that time) McClane wants to hang out with him. He doesn’t exactly _say_ ‘hang out,’ and Matt’s not even certain that he _wants_ to as much as he probably thinks he _should_ to be a good host or something, but still. The sentiment is there, and it’s surprising, for a guy who told Matt an hour ago that he wasn’t planning on small talk being a part of their housing arrangement. 

“Hey Ferrel. Get your nose out of that computer and come watch this movie with me,” is what he says, voice so rough it feels like something scraping over Matt’s skin. He cringes, backspaces the last few numbers he’s botched. 

“Trading one glowing screen for another isn’t really a break, if that’s what you’re trying to get me to do,” he replies from the kitchen table, rubbing his burning eyes with the heels of his hands. 

“Not trying to do anything but get you to watch a movie with me. Your typing is driving me crazy,” McClane calls from the living room, there he’s sitting on the couch, beer in hand, the game on the TV rattling away. 

Matt stands up, and his knees crack. He has plenty left in him, he’s used to staring at computer screens for much longer stretches of time than McClane can probably imagine, but he feels like he should probably be a good houseguest. Or at least, be perceived as a good houseguest, seeing as he’s already completely ruined his chances at ever _actually_ being a good houseguest due to his creepy fixation on McClane. He saves his work, shuts his laptop and gives up. “What movie?”

“Dunno. Had it lying around for awhile...something about drug trafficking in Mexico. Here,” he sits up, hands Matt a DVD.

Matt’s eyes flick up to McClane’s for a split second, then back down again, because he’s the kind of guy who blushes easily and he wants to conceal this unsavory fact about himself. He scans the back of the DVD. “I dunno. This isn’t really my style of movie.” 

“Why,” McClane asks, swigging his beer. “Because it’s depressing? You only like happy endings, kid?” 

Matt makes a face. It’s a familiar face, the face he makes whenever his darkness and nonconformity are brought into question. “No. No, not because it’s depressing. I love depressing things. I _am_ a depressing thing.” He briefly debates on whether or not McClane is capable of hearing and absorbing the real reason why he doesn’t want to watch this ridiculous movie about drug cartels in _Columbia_ , not Mexico, which is that he detests cinema which glamorizes drug use, or that distills the very rich culture of South America into petty criminal organizations and slums, because it’s totally imperial and no better than orientalism, just somehow more socially acceptable, which actually kind of makes it worse. 

He doesn’t get a chance to test out this argument, because McClane interrupts him. “Depressing? You’re not depressing. You’re like a puppy.” His voice is incredulous, and Matt bristles, realizing how little McClane takes him seriously. He wonders if this whole roommate situation is based on McClane feeling like he’s taking in a stray, and this movie business is some half-assed shot at weird, father-pseudo-son bonding. He also wonders if he will feel perpetually ten years old if he stays here. 

“Hey man, I’m wanted by the FBI. I’m not a puppy. I think you’re underestimating me because I’m skinny. I could be a very powerful man.” 

“Yeah, well. Maybe you’re a criminal hacker puppy, but you’re still a puppy. At the end of the day you still have those big brown eyes. They give you away.” 

Matt raises one brow at McClane, who is looking entirely too complacent and pleased with himself on the couch. It feels weird that McClane is talking about his eyes and their alleged bigness and brownness. Maybe it isn’t weird, and what makes it weird is that Matt is weird about everything. He lowers his eyebrow, decides to change the subject. “So, uh, what other DVDs do you have?” 

“Drawer under the TV,” McClane grunts. “Whole collection is in there.” 

It isn’t much of a collection. There are some TV series from the 70s taped on VHS, and a handful of mismatched DVDs. Matt holds one up, grinning. “Seabiscuit? You have _Seabiscuit_?” 

McClane shrugs. “I like horse racing.” 

“These movies suck.” 

McClane shrugs again, unfazed. 

There are strange, conflicting feelings rising in Matt’s chest and making it tight, coming too fast to name and identify and therefore deal with. So Matt doesn’t deal with them. He swallows, pushes his hair out of his face and hopes he isn’t flushed. Forces everything unusual deeper, below his solar plexus. “Tell you what. I’m not going to watch any of these movies because I actually have taste, but I will watch the game.” 

It’s McClane’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “ _You_ like football? I thought you were attached to your computer. Can’t really throw a ball when you’re attached to a computer.” 

“I like _watching_ it. Not playing it.” 

“Huh. Could have fooled me.”

Matt sits down on the couch, a few safe feet away from McClane’s thigh, where his hands rests in a loose grip around a beer bottle. He keeps his eyes there, on the bottle, instead of letting them rove across his shoulders, the broad, hard planes of them filling out McClane’s ratty grey teeshirt. He’s already spent too much time looking at them, he’s probably wandering over into awkward territory if he does it again. “Football is totally a nerd’s game, if that’s what you’re getting at. That nerds don’t watch sports, I mean. Um, it’s all a math problem though. Like horse racing. All football games are fixed, you know that, right? It’s one big conspiracy.”

McClane nods, very slowly. “You turn football into a math problem.” 

“No, it already is.” 

“I’m not fooled anymore. It’s all making sense, now. The hackboy watching sports.” he grins suddenly, and it catches Mat off guard, hits him in the chest. “So you think it’s all a conspiracy? To make money?” 

“Obviously,” Matt has his hand up, and is ready to launch into all his theories which are less theories and more proven facts in his book. 

“Hm. Well. I just watch it to see guys knocked down,” he says, thoughtfully sipping his beer. “So I’ll let you watch the game with me. You just gotta promise you won’t tell me any crap about math.” 

Matt sighs. “You got it,” he says skeptically, doubting his own ability to remain silent about how fucking obviously fixed football games are. He kicks his tennis shoes off, crosses his legs under himself on the couch. “So, I see the Patriots are winning.” He bites his tongue, but only for a second. “That’s a shocker.” 

“They’re a good team,” McClane responds, not giving one inch. 

“That’s one way to put it,” Matt says cryptically. 

Then McClane looks at Matt, reaches across the space between them, and flicks Matt’s bicep with his thumb and forefinger. Hard. 

“Ouch!” Matt snaps, grabbing his newly bruised arm, clutching at the sting. “Did you just _flick me?_ With your _fingers?_ How old are you, dude?” 

McClane is grinning in this unguarded way, teeth showing and eyes crinkled up in an easy, genuine mirth at the corners. He chuckles. “Old enough to be your dad, kid.” 

And there, there it is. The blush, red and explosive, across Matt’s formerly pale cheeks. He ducks his head, tries to hide behind his bangs again. “Don’t remind me,” he grumbles, hoping there are multiple ways to interpret that aside from the way he means it. 

Someone scores a touchdown and McClane turns his attention towards the game again, leaving Matt to nurse his wound and his flush. Commercial break comes, and they stay quiet, on opposite ends of the couch. 

Eventually, McClane sets his empty beer bottle down on the coffee table in front of them, studies it for a moment, then cuts his eyes to Matt. “Can I ask you something, Ferrel?” 

“Yeah...” Mat answers warily. He wouldn’t worry about whatever McClane is about to say were it not for the weird tint of unplaceable hesitance in his voice. McClane isn’t someone Matt sees as _hesitant._ He’s kind of a shoot first, as questions later type of guy. But here are the questions that come later. He sounds uncertain, and Matt is nervous about it. 

“Don’t you have any parents?” is what he asks. Not at all what Matt anticipated. 

“Well yeah, I have them. I’m not an android. I was created the old fashioned way,” Matt quips, chewing on his thumbnail. His cheeks seem to have returned to their natural, not burning red state, so he flicks his hair off his brow, squares up McClane in his gaze. 

McClane shakes his head, making a face. “No, kid. I know you _have_ parents. But why aren’t you ringing them for help? Why are you staying with me instead of your folks?” There’s a crease through his brow, and Matt can tell he suspects they’re dead. That he’s an orphan. It’s a common response, he’s been on his own for a few years, never talks about his parents. Most people just assume that it’s some tragic, gruesome tale with car accidents and foster homes, the whole shebang. Matt’s unsure if the real tale qualifies as tragic or gruesome, but he’s always resented that assumption that death is the worst possible alternative. That being an orphan is automatically worse than any truth where his parents are still alive, let along still married and as well off as they were when he last saw the,. 

“Because you offered, they didn’t,” he settles on as a suitable answer. 

“Huh.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Aren’t too close?” McClane pushes. 

Matt sighs, deciding he should just go into the sugar coated version and give up on the mysterious noncommittal answers, because McClane is not the kind of guy to take a hint and leave him alone. “No, not really. They disowned me after I got expelled from college. But it was a long, rocky road up until that point...um, lots of threats. Lots of nights spent on friend’s trundle-beds and stuff, lots of expectations not-lived-up-to. We don’t talk anymore, their choice, not mine.” This is mostly true, save for the part about whose choice is. It’s actually more mutual, but Matt knows about Lucy, knows about the wars of silence she declares against his dad. He thinks he’ll probably gain more of McClane’s sympathy, and therefore diminish his chances of getting beaten up, if he makes it extremely clear that he’s not some brat giving mommy and daddy the silent treatment. 

McClane nods, slowly. “That’s too bad.” 

“Yeah. Too bad,” Matt says, trying hard to keep the bite of sarcasm out of his voice because he knows McClane isn’t good at talking about stuff, that he probably isn’t trying to sound like an insensitive jerk. 

“Well, they’re missing out. You’re a smart kid.” 

Matt narrows his eyes. ‘Smart Kid’ is such an odd phrase, something he’s been dealt his whole life from various authority figures. Usually it precedes a ‘but’ and then a list of offenses. _Matt’s a smart kid. Very bright, very promising. But he is a constant classroom disruption. Very isolated. Socially premature in many areas. The object of ridicule._ Or, eventually, _Matt is a very intelligent young man, but due to the numerous security and honor code violations upon his record, we have decided that he is ultimately not right for our institution, and will not be invited back to reenroll for the fall semester._ In short, ‘smart kid’ is the bullshit half compliment adults give him when they’re letting him know that he has potential, but is otherwise disposable, nonfunctional, in trouble. 

Historically, being called “smart kid” isn’t on Matt’s list of things he wants to hear from people older than him. “You know, people only refer to me as that when they think I’m defective in some other area. Or when they want to save me. Is that what this is? Is this all one, big, ‘lemme act like a father figure to this kid’ schtick to make up for where you think you wen’t wrong with Lucy?” Matt says it before he can stop himself. And it’s drenched. With cynicism, bitterness, all of the stuff that’s directed at his actual parents, the other authority figures, not the stand in version McClane might be trying to be. As soon as he says it, he regrets it, pulls back in on himself and cowers. “Shit, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, please don’t hit me.” 

McClane’s eyes are as hard as green glass for a moment, flickering with flame amongst darkness. Then it’s gone, back to its usual hardness of armor, rather than the hardness of obsidian, steel. He cocks his head, looks across the room at nothing in particular, so old, so tired. “That’s not what I’m doing,” he finally says before standing, grabbing his empty bottle off the table. 

He walks into kitchen and tosses the bottle into the trash with a clatter. Matt waits in the couch, heart beating hard. 

“Told you. Don’t think of you that way,” McClane calls back to him. His footsteps echo all the way out the front door of the apartment, and into the outside hallway. 

Matt rubs his face with both sweating palms, eyes shut tight. “Shit,” he mumbles, willing his pulse to slow. 

McClane comes back in a half hour with take out, and acts like nothing ever happened. Asks Matt who won the gave after the Patriots, if he predicted the outcome with logarithms. They eat chow-mein, Matt eyeing McClane suspiciously for the duration, wondering how McClane can possibly keep _fooling_ him, acting in ways Matt doesn’t expect, couldn’t have written if he tried. McClane has one up on him, that’s for sure. 

Later, as he tries to fall asleep, Matt realizes there is no math in the world that can work to predict this. He tries to be okay with that. 

\---

They fall into a routine. It’s almost comfortable. McClane wakes up at an ungodly hour, brews coffee, slams all the cupboards, hums jazz which sounds like _noise_ because jazz always sounds like noise to Matt, especially when it’s being hummed by tone deaf people. McClane’s complete and utter lack of respect for people who _don’t_ wake up at ungodly hours inevitably ends up rousing Matt, who complains a lot about being cold and having slept poorly. McClane, in turn, complains about having a fussy princess for a houseguest, and then offers up his bed. Each time like it’s a novelty. 

And each time, like it’s a novelty, Matt expresses some vague protest. Just to keep the image up of not being entirely comfortable with it (which is pretty true, but just because it makes him uncomfortable doesn’t mean he doesn’t look forward to the safe, dark warmth of that bed every morning). Of course, he eventually caves. Stumbles to McClane’s bedroom in his threadbare jockey shorts and Lacuna Coil teeshirt with the rip in the underarm, and falls into it. Sleeps. Sometimes until McCane’s shift ends, sometimes only a few hours. Then he’ll wake up, feed himself, hammer away on his keyboard waiting for McClane to bust in the door like a force of nature, loud and gruff and angry because he’s almost always in a godawful mood after work. 

They’ll talk. Piss each other off, draw too much attention to all the places where their lifestyles differ. Then they’ll ignore each other for awhile, until one comes slinking back, usually to the couch where McClane likes to have his evening beer and watch whatever sport is playing as long as it’s not wrestling, boxing, or MMA, all of which he hates and thinks are fake. Then they’ll talk again. Matt tries to hold his tongue, tries to sit on his conspiracy theories and knowledge of radical social movements and enormous vocabulary and general distaste for all the music and movies and teams that McClane likes. He’ll try and just listen, because he wants to know shit. 

The evenings are when he learns things about McClane. He never asks outright, they just kind of come up, volunteered in this slow, quiet way that makes Matt wonder whether or not McClane is really even telling _him_ these things as much as he’s saying them to the air, just to hear them and know they might be real, and Matt just happens to be there. Kind of a witness, gaining entrance to whatever humanity McClane has hidden under his layers of grit and ash and years-old sorrow because he’s forcing himself to be quiet. It makes sense. This is what Matt _does_ , after all, what he’s good at. Cracking codes, finding the loophole, pushing his way in. Matt likes to think he’s discovering a way around John McClane’s interior security system. 

They aren’t even big things. They’re things Matt knows, or at least things he could gather and imagine given what he does know about McClane. But still, hearing them makes his palms sweat, makes him force a few knuckles between his teeth so he can bite down, maintain the exhausting silence on his part to preserve whatever it is about the air that’s making McClane able to talk straight and honest. 

Things about Holly. Things about Lucy. Things about the blood on his hands, how he acts like it’s no big deal, just a part of his job, like death is just a part of life. But really, when it comes down to it, he’s not so sure. He says there are faces that haunt him, images of compound fractures, bones bust free from flesh, brains bust forth from skulls. Other busted things. Things he did, has had done to him, and can’t forget, even when he tries to tell himself he doesn’t want to. 

One night he tells Matt (or the room that Matt’s in, at least) that he’s not so sure he’s a hero. That he doesn’t really believe in heroes, just people who do their jobs because they have nothing to lose, who risk everything to save a life because theirs is already condemned. Unlucky guys. Lucky ones depending upon how you look at it. Matt tries hard to stay silent, damn near bites a fucking hole through his own hand, but everything inside him is clenching too hard to maintain that kind of control. He lets go, mumbles, “Dude, if you’re not a hero, who is? You’re, like, superhuman. You took down a military fighter jet with your _bare hands_. You’re the incredible hulk.” 

He wants McClane to laugh, pat Matt’s knee like he sometimes does, absently, and keep talking, explain how his superhumanity is only a function of his own loneliness, his willingness to sacrifice himself for whatever task is at hand because it’s a miracle he’s not dead yet, a fluke. But instead, McClane looks at him suddenly, eyes flashing, like he’s only just realized that he’s there. Then he shakes his head, brings his beer bottle to his lips even though it’s been empty for awhile. “Yeah,” he finally says, low, lost. “Maybe.” 

And then he stops talking, and Matt regrets ever opening his mouth. 

Eventually, nights disintegrate into silence and McClane retires to bed, leaving Matt to huddle on the couch in a mess of his own self-recrimination, listening hard to the sounds of McClane brushing his teeth, spitting into the sink, washing his face, pissing, flushing, flicking off the lights and getting into bed. Matt wonders if the sheets smell different now that he spends hours there every day, if McClane is forced to inhale him as he nods off the way Matt has to inhale him. If they’re stuck with ghosts of each other, chasing the real thing, stuck in an endless circle of holding patterns and missed moments. 

Of course, here’s where the self-recrimination comes in. Because Matt is mostly sure that he’s the only one in in this house (and possibly the entire world) who thinks this much. He is mostly sure that McClane thinks about the way his own sheets smell about as much as he thinks about quantum physics. Which is not at all. (Matt knows; he’s brought up that topic with relatively zero success). He’s mostly sure that John McClane is an old, lonely, broken man who does the right thing because he’s trying to rinse blood from his record. That he’s giving some kid a couch to sleep on because he’s convinced there’s some debt to pay, but there’s the extent of it. Some kid on his couch. Not a scent on his pillowcase, not warmth or safety or something new, not a glimmer of possibility.

Matt feels so sorry for himself it makes him kind of sick. He often gets stomach aches after McClane goes to sleep, so he sits there on the couch drinking ginger ale and clutching his abdomen while he tries to focus on logarithms, but can only focus on the pain in his gut coupled with the pain between his legs of ignored-boner. He decides that he is a mentally unstable person. There is no other explanation for how much this whole thing is changing from late night fantasies of the cop who saved his life a few thousand times fucking him into the mattress, to this terrifying desire to _know_ the cop who saved his life a few thousand times in addition to fucking him. To deconstruct him, crack his codes, find the loop hole. Push his way inside. 

Matt doesn’t have the slightest idea what love is. He’s not quite sure that love is an applicable word for this mortifying shift from Post Traumatic Sexual Attraction Disorder to Post Traumatic Wanting To Spend All One’s Time As Close as Possible to and Getting To Know as Much as Possible About John McClane Disorder. It’s probably a form of psychosis he would know about if he hadn’t gotten expelled, and pursued a career in the corrupt field of Clinical Psychology instead of the illegal field of hacking into stuff you shouldn’t be hacking into. If it’s not psychosis, it’s at least maladaptive. Probably not love. Definitely not love. Probably obsession. Infatuation. 

Each night Matt spends hours denoting these words and hacking into JSTOR to read psychology articles about trauma. The routine he’s fallen into involves angrily exiting all of these windows sometime around three am, trying to crash, failing to crash, or crashing and having nightmares about asking his parents for money, getting shot at by assassins, or telling John McClane that he’s in love with him. 

A few hours later he gets woken up by the coffee maker and someone whistling Charlie Parker’s birdland. He rolls over, McClane tells him he should seize the day. He tells McClane he can’t seize the day when it’s not yet the day and is instead the time when all evil roams the earth until the sun is properly up. McClane tells him he can have his bed. He tells him it’s weird. McClane assures him it’s not. They dance the familiar dance, follow the scripts, say what the other expects him to say. McClane leaves, Matt sleeps. Then he wakes up and they start it all over again. 

\---  
It’s Thursday night when the power goes out. Or, the landlord shuts the power off. Whenever there’s some electrical mishap or issue with the utilities, McClane is never sure whether he forgot to pay the bill, or if everything in the apartment is just shitty. Because Matt’s entire console can run off of a generator, he looks up McClane’s records. “Your apartment is just shitty. Looks like you were on time this month,” he tells him. 

McClane raises an eyebrow. “Hey, how are you looking that up? What else do you know about me?” He reaches for the laptop, but Matt is used to people trying to snatch it out of of his hands to see whatever he can see, so he’s prepared for it. One of the few areas where his reflexes excel. 

“Hmm...not a lot. Just your bills. Credit card records. Um, a few payments made to a Kalissta Kathouse last March. Kalissta. That’s a nice name, she a friend of your daughter’s?” Matt grins, jerking out of the way before McClane even has time to go for the laptop. 

“Very clever, kid. Unfortunately, all of my calls to Kalissta Kathouse were professional rather than recreational. I was working a case.” 

“In a Kathouse?” 

“In a Kathouse,” McClane says firmly, nodding in a conversation ending way. “The job has its perks. Sometimes.” 

“Yeah, okay,” Matt says with some fervent nods, one eyebrow arched in skepticism.

McClane’s in the kitchen, on his hands and knees, rummaging noisily around in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. “I thought I had some candles down here,” he says to himself, but it’s loud enough for Matt to hear. Because Matt listens, obnoxiously, to the details of every moment he’s sharing the room with McClane, just in case there’s something like this, whispered under his breath. 

“You? Candles? For all your romantic dates? ” Matt exits out of his windows, stands up to go help McClane, because he’s not a blind old man and is probably better suited to the hands and knees type of stuff. He tries to ignore the images that flash across his brain at this notion, the rug burn, the sweat that would drip from his chest into the carpet, the quaking of his arms as he held himself up, under the immense weight and power of McClane’s thrusting body. He hangs back for a moment, dragging a hand down his heated cheek. 

McClane grunts, sits back on his haunches. “No. For power outages, because everything in my apartment is a piece of shit.” He looks over at his shoulder at Matt, perspiration beaded on the smooth top of his head. He looks glorious in the dark, broad and strong, the tension in his arms a visible thing from where Matt’s standing, awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot like a kid who has to pee. McClane stands up. “Hey, young limber thing. Why don’t you dig around in there, see if you can find those tapers. I’ll go get the flashlight.” 

Matt stops moving. Swallows hard, hoping the scant light from his computer screen isn’t belying the flush along his throat. He realizes with dismay that McClane has rendered him devoid of wit. “Right. Flashlight,” he mumbles in a horrifyingly wit-devoid fashion. 

McClane doesn’t appear to notice, which is to be expected, because much of the tension that exists between them Matt is fairly certain he invented. McClane is not very attune to the nuances of communication, so he doesn’t ever seem to be aware of Matt’s sudden changes in voice tone or behavior. It’s probably better this way. Matt ducks into the cupboard, finds a plastic bag with three stubby looking half-burnt white tapers inside, and one overly-fragrant cinnamon Christmas votive. He knocks the back of his skull on the underside of the sink on his way up. He curses humanity, rubbing the bruise as it begins to raise and swell.

McClane comes back and shines a flashlight into his eyes. “Found it. Did you hit your head or something?” 

“No,” Matt lies. “I found your candles, though. Very festive. I didn’t know you were the commercial holiday type, Mr. Sentiment.” He tosses the bag to McClane, who holds up the votive to the light. It’s red, with little glittery snowmen emblazoned on the side of it.

He shrugs. “They were Holly’s.” 

Matt shrugs back. He thinks that if McClane were anybody but McClane, he would expect an apology. But as he’s grown to know McClane and the way he deals with things, chews things up, swallows things, moves on from them, Matt has learned that it’s better for both of them if he just drops it. He cards a hand through his own hair, following McClane into the living room where he finds him shoving the bases of the tapers into empty wine bottles, illuminated only by the cold blue shine of the laptop. 

“She was big into Christmas,” McClane says after a few moments of struggling to light a match, striking the flimsy cardboard box so hard it keeps collapsing. Matt is startled that the conversation isn’t over like he thought it was, so he fumbles over words in his brain, momentarily paralyzed. McClane finally succeeds with the matches, and they’re both cloaked in a warm orange glow for a moment, the smell of sulfur familiar and biting on the air. 

“Oh yeah? And you?” Matt asks carefully, hands in his pockets. He watches McClane’s rough, sure palms light each candle in turn, then shake the match out. Smoke rises in delicate tendrils from his fingers. 

McClane shrugs again, sits down on the couch. He kicks one foot up onto the coffee table, next to his half-assed candle arrangement, and sighs a deep sigh. “I dunno. Not really. Christmas doesn’t mean much when you don’t have someone to spend it with.” He grins, eyes falling on Matt. “What about you? You probably think the holidays are the root of all corporate evil or something, right?” 

Matt doesn’t know what to say. Of course, he _does_ think that the holidays are the root of all corporate evil. Or, at least he used to. Before he helped save the world, and then came down with this infuriating nameless mental illness that is making him into a sap and twisting his former cynicism into something almost _hopeful_. He wants to drown this new self, this scary, infant version of himself that’s relieved to be alive, because he almost learned what it was to die. It’s a foreign self. He bunches his shoulders around his ears, feeling tight and awkward as he stands in the middle of a semi-dark room. “Something like that,” he answers. “But who knows. I’m probably not as, um, successfully indifferent to the contamination of popular culture as I like to think I am.” 

“Well, hell. I knew that. Told you, you’re a puppy.” 

“A Christmas puppy?” Matt asks, simultaneously dismayed by his inability to be truly impermeable, and thrilled at whatever feelings are bubbling inside him like a shaken soda, explosive and carbonated. 

“Yeah. With a fuckin’ bow around its neck,” McClane says. “Hey kid. Grab me a beer instead of standing around like you’re waiting for me to do something. Might as well drink em’ all before they get warm.” 

Obediently, Matt goes to the kitchen and gets McClane a beer, wondering how exactly he had been regarding McClane, and what about it indicated that he was _waiting_ for him to do something. He vows to never look at him that way again, however it was. He hears McClane shout at him, “By the way, this is why I don’t buy refrigerated shit. It all goes bad when the power goes out. And the power _always_ goes out.” 

“Yeah, I’ve kind of figured that out,” Matt wheezes after he comes back to the living room, handing McClane the still-chilled bottle. He sits down beside him. “Everything in your apartment is an incredible piece of shit. My computer excluded.” 

McClane makes a face, uses the bottle-opener on his keyring to pop the cap off his beer. “Well, you get what you pay for, houseboy. Plus, you’re a charity case. You don’t have to be here if you don’t like it.” 

Matt wishes he had stopped trying to prove that he’s grateful, but he can’t stop. Every time his motives or appreciation for being here, in McClane’s house, on his couch are questioned, he freaks out. Stumbles over his words, gets all sputtery and asthmatic and red with trying to defend himself and how badly he wants to be here. These incidents always end with McClane looking at him like he’s the craziest, most pathetic thing he’s ever seen. But still, every time, Matt can’t take it as a joke. 

This time is no exception. “No, no, no, no. I would be starving to death in a gutter if it weren't for you. Or, at least, like, starving to death in a hacker’s basement somewhere. My eyes would have fallen out of my skull courtesy of acute exposure to too much Halo 4. So, um, thank you.” 

McClane is quiet, staring thoughtfully at the flicker of the candles on the table. Wax is dripping down the length of the wine bottles and hardening into brittle white strips. Matt waits an excruciating wait. He is terrible at waiting. This is one of the most infuriating things about McClane: he says short sentences after much silence and consideration. Matt says long sentences after no silence and limited consideration. He likes to think he’s just a faster processor than most people, but he’s starting to suspect that he’s actually just a particularly impatient human being. 

Finally, McClane says, “Yeah. I know you say you got nowhere else to go...but kid. Sometimes I think there’s got to be a better option.” He looks up, eyes heavy with green. He seems uncertain, like he’s taken in his stray dog to give it a better life, a chance at survival, and it only just realizing he doesn’t know shit about how to take care of dogs. “Our lifestyles aren’t exactly the most compatible.” 

Matt shakes his head violently, hair whipping himself in the face. “No better option.” 

“That’s what you say. But I know you got friends. And I could put you up in a motel, at least for awhile. Until you got your feet on the ground. I owe you, and--”

Matt cuts him off, hand raising to cut through the air between them in emphasis, nervous laughter in his voice. “You don’t _owe_ me, if you owe me then I owe you fifty times more, we could call it even--”

“ _I owe you_ , and I don’t mind keeping you here. But there’s got to be a better place. Somewhere with working heat. And a fridge. Somewhere that feeds you more than Spaghetti-Os. You’re a fuckin’ beanpole, kid. I oughta be feeding you better,” McClane says, and the regret in his voice is so deep and poisonous that it shocks Matt, sends tendrils of ice into his blood. If there was ever any question in his heart about _why_ McClane is doing this for him, they’re answered by the regret in his voice. He is paying old dues. Cleaning old stains. Playing the father, the mentor, the good guy, so he can feel like less of a dead man walking. Matt feels sick. Sick, and incredibly lonely. 

“You know, I’m not your son. You don’t have to do this, you’re not obligated to...and doing it...doing it isn’t gonna fix shit between you and Lucy. I really, really fucking appreciate what you’re doing, man. I need a place to stay. I need a couch to sleep on. But I don’t need a dad. I especially don’t want _you_ to be my dad. No offense or anything. It’s just not...not the way I think about you.” Matt smiles a watery smile, feeling scrutinized under the gaze McClane is casting on him. His own eyes are fixed on his knees, the way the skin of the left one is showing through a tear in his black jeans. He picks at the hem, thinking hard, his heart sinking deep and low into his gut. 

“That’s another thing you keep saying. Ferrel. I don’t know what I have to tell you to convince you, but you being here has _nothing_ to do with my relationship with my daughter. And I am _not_ interested in being your dad.” Then McClane laughs suddenly. A cold, low, scraping laugh like he knows something Matt doesn’t. It makes Matt look up in time to see McClane rub his eyes with his knuckles and say, almost inaudibly “Shit.Would be a hell of a lot easier if I was.” 

Matt doesn’t know what that means. 

They’re quiet together. The air smells like beer and cinnamon Christmas candle, cloying and headachey. Finally, once his heart rate is back to a normal, functional, non-dangerous level, he says, “Okay. I guess I believe you.” 

“Yeah,” McClane answers, which is not really an answer. 

Matt takes a deep breath which aches in his lungs, cradles his brow in his palm. He feels like there is really no better time to have this conversation, no better time to tell McClane that he’s here not because he doesn’t have anywhere more practical to go, but because there is something _wrong_ with him. That he’s Post Traumatic in too many ways to count, that he doesn’t feel _safe_ unless he can smell McClane’s aftershave. 

Well. Maybe not tell him _all_ that stuff, but some version of it. Something that will help make sense of his choice to stay. He inhales slowly, and shuts his eyes, because he thinks that might make it easier. “Um, I don’t really know how to explain this...but. Ugh. I...uh...I _want_ to be _here_. Specifically.” 

McClane doesn’t say anything. It’s oddly encouraging, so Matt continues. “I _need_ to be here because ever since the fire-sale, and ever since getting shot in the knee...ever since all of that, I’ve been a totally different person. And this new person, does not, um, function well in society. And this new person is like, all, weirdly nervous, and freaked out by everything, and can’t sleep. But, _but_ , see, this new person feels much better when they’re here. With you.”

Matt waits for something horrible to happen. 

McClane says, “Sounds like PTSD.” 

Raising his eyebrows and looking up, Matt wonders if it can really be all that easy. That all of his problems could be _that_ typical, that textbook. That he could have classified himself as the most obvious acronym of them all, that there really isn’t a better suited, magical PT _something_ out there in the DSM, and he is really just responding how any normal person respond when they almost end the world, then save it in a rain of shotgun shells. And that the whole thing with McClane could be an entirely different beast. Obsession. Infatuation. Love. 

“Maybe,” he says. 

“Makes sense,” McClane offers. It’s bizarre how unsurprised he seems about all of this. Matt supposes that makes sense, too. It’s not like McClane hasn’t saved _other_ people’s lives, too. It’s not like he’s unused to people feeling safe around him, to seeing him as an end to the terror they feel after almost dying. Matt is always trying to remind himself of so many things, that he forgets to remind himself that he’s not special. That John McClane has saved the world before, saved kids like him before. 

Somehow, that makes the stakes seem less high. Matt is feeling reckless, poised on the brink of revelation. So he says it, because it’s the plainest truth there is about all of this, minus the other plain truths about the other stuff, but he can’t say that stuff. At least not yet. 

“I dunno. Since all that happened, I only really feel safe with you. But not in a dad way. Just a person way. I don’t really, um, want to be somewhere else right now.” 

He dares to look at McClane, secretly, through his hair. He’s nodding slowly. There’s half a smile on his lips, he looks even older than he is in the flicker of flame. This whole thing feels like a pantomime of romance, candlelight and confessions and the admission of safety. Of intimacy. Matt rubs his face on his shoulder because it stings, and he wonders what will be different after this, if it will all change once he’s been vulnerable. If this is the end of something. 

McClane finally speaks. “So, I guess I should stop trying to kick your ass out.” His voice is warm, soft, thoughtful. Matt wonders if this is the way Holly remembers his voice, if she remembers it at all, or if she chose to forget. 

Matt tries to sit up straight, give straight answers. Stop being such a slouchy, scared kid. “Unless you want me out,” he says. 

McClane shakes his head, takes a swig of beer. “No.” Swallows. “Don’t want that.” 

___

The candles have almost burn down to puddles of wax. Matt is staring at McClane, wondering if there’s any possibility that he missed something. That he could be wrong. And, if there _is_ any chance of it, if he should find out. If it’s worth all of that risk. 

The safe feeling is there. Matt feels bedded down in it, completely free from all the threat in the world, even free from the threat of McClane physically injuring him if he found out exactly the extent of Matt’s feelings. Maybe it’s finally feeling warm, maybe it’s just being drunk on the adrenaline from telling the truth about something, explaining the nuance of why he is here. Whatever it is, Matt feels incomparably safe. Untouchable. Like nothing he says to McClane in this moment will result in disaster, because he trusts McClane. He wonders if he could feel that way if it was only coming from him. He doubts it, but he doubts his doubt of it more. 

Still, without pausing to stop himself, Matt closes his eyes again and says, “You know, the reason things didn’t work out between me and lucy?” 

“Yeah?” McClane’s voice is softer than Matt’s ever heard it, this shaded thing in the dark, like he had just been interrupted out of a deep reverie. _This is probably how he sounded to Holly_ Matt thinks again. And again, Matt would normally feel dirty for even thinking it, but he doesn’t. Not right now. 

“It _was_ for all the reasons I said. Before, when you asked me. But, um, most of all, it was because I realized she wasn’t what I wanted from you.” 

And there it is. It hangs in the air between them, and immediately the fear comes back. Matt wants to pull his words back in like they were hooked through a fishing line, a cold terror rising in his throat, unswallowable. It seems too true, too vulnerable, too real to be saying. McClane’s quiet is unnerving, sits heavy in Matt’s gut like stone. 

“Please say something,” Matt pleads gravely, suddenly not able to stand the way McClane talks, his long, aching pauses. 

McClane taps his finger against the glass of his beer bottle. “What do you want from me?” he eventually says. Then he turns to look at Matt, eyes hooded but still flickering in the shadow. Remarkably, he seems relaxed, sprawled on the couch with his limbs outstretched, head against the back cushion, one foot kicked up onto the coffee table. Matt tries to find hostility in him, even a far-away, imagined thread of it, but he sees nothing. He tries to imagine McClane punching him right now if he were to utter, _I accidentally fell in love with you, I think._ It seems improbable. Impossible, even. 

He wants to answer, but instead he just looks down, picks at his thumbnail with his teeth. 

“Matt,” McClane says, one quiet syllable. And Matt looks back up at him, his eyes blown so wide and black and full of things that there’s no way, _no fucking way_ that even an alien like John McClane couldn’t read what he is saying with them. There is a well of misery mired there, bright and exposed. 

McClane sees it. He has to see it. He shakes his head. “Kid. You’re killing me,” he says.

“Yeah. Likewise,” Matt admits, in a ball on his side of the couch. Everything is falling down inside of him, crumbling in on itself like a house made of sugar. This is what he predicted, what he _knew_. He shouldn’t have let that one tiny moment of McClane stretched out and relaxed beside him, eyes warm and crinkled at the edges, lead him anywhere different. 

McClane shifts his weight and sits up a little taller, looks thoughtfully into his lap where his hand is curled around the neck of his beer bottle. Then he leans forward, sets it carefully down on the edge of the table. He takes a deep breath. “It’s a bad idea,” he tells Matt. 

“Fuck, man. I know that. Of course I know that. You think I don’t already know that?” Matt wheezes, a creeping panic to his words. 

McClane holds a hand up between them, silencing Matt. “No. Listen. It’s a bad idea. I’m not saying I’ve thought about it--”

And suddenly everything changes, because he _sounds_ different. It’s there, the same well of misery is there, in his voice. The same wide black fullness. Matt is stunned, but he runs with it. 

“That means you _have_ thought about it,” he interjects, heat on his cheeks, skin prickling. 

McClane stares at him like he doesn’t want to, rubs a hand over his head, presses his lips together. And that silence, the time it takes him to swallow what Matt has said, is enough. Matt’s heart speeds up, thundering in his chest like he’s just run a race. He stares back at John through his hair, defiant, determined. Then he sits up in his haunches, squares up his shoulders to McClane, and braces his hands on broad shoulders, shaking so hard his elbows feel weak, feeling such solidity beneath him sends sensation coursing through his stomach in waves. 

“Nah, kid.” McClane says firmly, tensing up under Matt’s hands, gripping him around the wrists with callous-rough hands and shaking his head. “Matt. _Matt_.We can’t. I can’t...Christ. You’re Lucy’s age.” 

“So?” Matt says, incredulous, dipping closer so his hair sticks to McClane’s brow, where sweat is beginning to bead. “Tell me I’m not wrong. Tell me you’ve thought about this.” 

McClane laughs dryly. “Tried not to.” 

_Fuck_ Matt thinks, all of him shaking, his heart so loud McClane must hear it. He’s so close to having an honest to god asthma attack right now he should fear for his life, but he feels too safe for that. 

He laughs too, edging his tremulous body closer to McClane’s on the couch. “I know. It’s fucked up, right?” 

McClane shakes his head, then tilts it back away from Matt, the jagged line of his throat exposed to candlelight and Matt _thinks_ about putting his lips there, ducks his chin a little, but stops himself. He’s pretty sure he has him. People will protest, people will _say_ they can’t do something, but if they really can’t, they won’t. McClane would have shoved him off his lap, would have put him in a headlock before _killing_ him already. He’s stronger. He could stop this. But he isn’t. He’s twisting his head out of the way, but he’s still exposing his throat. People didn’t _do_ that if they didn’t only mean the protest halfway. 

“I want this,” Matt tells him. 

“No you don’t kid. They all say that,” McClane says roughly, voice thick. 

“I’m different,” Matt says. 

McClane wouldn’t look him square in the eye until this moment, when it seems like he tries not to, but can’t. His eyes fall hard and flashing onto Matt’s, green-brown and reflecting fire. “Yeah. Yeah, you are. Can’t say no to that.” His lips stay parted like he’s going to say something else, something beginning in _but_. 

But. Matt kisses him, pressing his lips into the corner of his mouth so uncertainly neither of them are even sure it’s a kiss for a moment, until Matt slots his lips against McClane’s, pushed himself closer, contact unmistakable. He can feel the tingle of beer with the tip of his tongue, the thud of his heart somewhere too close to his throat. 

McClane doesn’t kiss back, but he doesn’t pull away. He shudders, hands clenching and unclenching on Matt’s forearms like he is trying to hard not to do something. Break something, make something. Give up or give in.

Matt pulls back again, lips red and soft, eyes terrified. “Please don’t hit me,” he says. 

Then John laughs, _really_ laughs this time, throws his head back and cracks up, eyes closed tight. _Finally_ , he reaches for Matt, lets go of his arms and fists two hands in his hair, pulls him in close, rough, so their mouths are close and Matt can feel his breath on his chin. “Not gonna hit you, kid,” then, “Fuck,” before drags their mouths together, bites into Matt’s lower lip with the rage of someone who feels like he fought, fought long and hard and honorably, but just couldn’t do it anymore. 

___

It’s all happening so fast. Matt feels crushed under McClane’s hands, their impossible pressure as they close over his thigh and his hip, pulling him onto his lap so that he can straddle McClane. He can’t breathe around this kind of kiss; it has too many teeth, too much spit. It’s what he wants, though. Brilliantly, he feels it all over his body, the stark certainty promised in the thought _I want this_. 

He grinds against McClane’s thighs, bucking against the hard planes of muscle in his stomach, letting his lips get licked apart, his hair to get pulled in desperate fistfuls. He feels overwhelmed by the smell of McClane around him, broken under the hungry roving of his hands. He’s already so hard in his jeans that his erection hurts, heavy and hot and straining against the zipper. He wants McClane to touch them there, palm him rough and sure, but he also wants to last. He might not last with McClane touching him. 

The kiss finally breaks and Matt gasps for air, his forehead dropping to rub against McClane’s shoulder, snagging along the soft, worn-thin teeshirt fabric where he wants there to be skin. He inhales, choked with want, lips mouthing along the taut, sweating lines of McClane’s neck. McClane makes an impatient noise, shrugging Matt off his shoulder, hand sliding up under his teeshirt to slat his fingers against the grooves made by his ribs. 

“Fuck,” Matt breathes, wincing at being touched under his clothes because it’s so much, so much pressure, so much imagined impossibility materializing around him. He lets go of McClane long enough to lift his arms and struggle out of his shirt as McClane pulls it off gracelessly, palming whatever flesh he can reach along the way. Exposed to the dark made by dying candles, Matt feels very small and very white in comparison to McClane, whose hands look huge on him, whose lap is broad enough for Matt’s thighs to ache from being spread over it. 

McClane brings a knee up, presses it against Matt’s ass to bring him closer, digging thumbs into the hollows under his ribcage as he leans forward to bite his nipple, stubble scraping Matt’s white skin pink. He lets go, mouths up Matt’s sternum, mauls his stomach, his back. “Your skin’s so soft,” he says like he’s in pain, through his teeth with his brow screwed up and eyes closed. “Can’t even fuckin’ believe it.” 

Matt can’t say anything, not through the wheezes and the whole general disbelief and mess of arousal. He just groans, arches his back, distantly wonders when the last time he’s been touched like this was, if he’s _ever_ been touched like his. McClane slides both hands into his hair, cradles the back of his skull in a brief moment of tenderness, finger aligned with the bruise the cabinet left him with, before he’s tugging his hair again, tilting Matt exactly how he wants him, kissing his mouth apart and unbreathing. 

Then he shoves Matt off, manipulates his body so he’s on his back and pressed into the couch, legs askew, flush all the way down his chest. Matt lays there, lifting his hips up to thrust pointlessly against air, canting towards McClane. “You can’t believe it?” he finally manages, reaching up to grip the tempered rage of McClane’s bicep, thumbing the thick, hard ridges between muscle. “ _I_ can’t believe it. Cannot even fucking believe that you want this like I do,” 

McClane shakes his head, rakes his nails down Matt’s sides. “Don’t want to,” he admits, bending to place a heavy, rasping kiss to Matt’s throat. “But I do.” 

“Fuck,” Matt says again, amazed by how limited his vocabulary becomes when McClane’s lips are on him. He rolls his head on the couch, hair sticking to his brow, teeth gritted together, skin itching and stinging with hunger. 

“Open your eyes, kid,” McClane says suddenly, reaching to push Matt’s hair out of the way, tuck it behind his ear where it’s long enough. “Want your eyes.” 

Matt does, thinking it’s a simple request, but not ready for how stricken McClane looks, mouth wet and kissed, lines through his brow, a terrifying intensity to his gaze like he’s looking beneath Matt’s jeans, beneath his skin. Matt reaches for his neck, pulls him down to kiss him. Pushes his tongue into his mouth. Body wrought with pulling, pushing, fraying, breaking. He wraps his legs around McClane’s waist and hooks his foot around his ankle, holding them locked. 

He thinks that this, this could be enough. Just rolling around on the couch, just getting _touched_ like this, worked into until his skin is raw and red from being scraped with stubble, teeth, callous. He could get off on just this, McClane biting his lips, licking the roof of his mouth. He doesn’t even _need_ to be touched under his jeans, really. His dick will be perfectly happy just grinding against the solidity of McClane’s thigh, the washboard of his stomach. 

Then, it occurs to Matt that _John McClane_ is on top of him, hard for him, grinding back against him, wanting him just as bad. He’s there, and Matt wants to touch him. With his hands, with his mouth, _anything_. He groans into the kiss, fumbles between them, tries to find the waistband of McClane’s slacks. McClane lets his mouth go for a second, sits back and looks at him. “Don’t even know what to do with you,” he mumbles hoarsely, dragging his fingers along Matt’s clavicle. 

Matt shakes his head. “Don’t have to do anything. I want to suck you off.” 

McClane raises an eyebrow, barks out a half-laugh, half-cough. “Oh yeah? With that mouth?” His hand slides up, cups the curve of Matt’s cheek so he can thumb open his lips. He bends over Matt’s prone body to press their foreheads together, eyes shut tight as he mumbles, “Dream about that mouth. It’s been driving me fucking crazy.” 

Matt’s stomach drops, and licks his lips, bowled over by the incredible swelling of sensation between his lungs, crushing all of his organs to dust. “You’ve been dreaming of me? Is that why you let me in your bed? So you can smell me on your sheets while you fall asleep?” he whispers, breath damp and hot between them until it’s kissed into nonexistence, crushed under McClane’s mouth. 

Then he’s breathing again, sucking cold air into his lungs while McClane leans back, disentangles himself to unbutton his slacks, slide them over his hips. Matt’s entire body is shaking as he slides off of the couch, positions himself between McClane’s bent knees. He feels small again, feels like his fucking _ribcage_ is the same width as McClane’s _thighs_. 

McClane’s dick is hard and in his face, violent red and leaking precum from the slit. Matt swallows, very carefully wraps his sweating hand around the steel-hard, coal-hot base of it. He is very relieved to have done this before, though not necessarily in the recent past, and not necessarily sober. But still. He knows the basic mechanics of it. 

“Christ, kid,” McClane says through his teeth, the low whine of it raising gooseflesh to Matt’s skin. McClane puts his hand in Matt’s hair again, fisting it in up to the wrist, gripping him hard. “You’re gorgeous.” 

Matt has definitely never been called that before and it makes his stomach coil in on itself like fist drawing fingers into a palm. He wonders if McClane has ever been with a guy before, and if not, if this is going to result in some kind of crisis. If he’s pretending that Matt, with his pretty face and dick-sucking lips, is a girl, some young number with short hair and a flat chest. He decides that he doesn’t care. 

He licks the bead of precum off the head of McClane’s dick, flicks it around the ridge of the glans, drooling with how unbelievable it feels to have the hot, musky weight of McClane resting there, on his lower lip. McCalane groans, pushes him firmly down the length of his dick before pulling him up slow again by his hair. 

His dick is already twitching, spasming between Matt’s lips and all of it, the heat, the taste, the smell, the feel, makes Matt drunk, desperate, wanting. He closes his eyes, furrows his brow in longing, and lets McClane fuck his face, dragging in and out pistoning until he comes suddenly, sticky and bitter and salty as he spills into Matt, who sputters but swallows, loving the burn of it down his throat. 

He doesn’t even have time to recover and taste air before McClane is hauling him up onto his lap again with hands under his arms, slamming their mouths together so hard Matt thinks his lip might be bleeding but who the fuck cares. He’s shaking, breathless, undone. They part, and McClane is grazing his stomach right above the waistband of his jeans, like he’s thinking about touching him, but isn’t sure. 

“Good?” Matt coughs, throat and mouth stinging and a little numb. “I’m a little rusty.” 

“Couldn’t tell,” McClane answers, eyes dark, hands sliding down to cup Matt’s ass. “I gotta tell you, I don’t know what to do. Don’t know how to touch you. I want to, just not sure I know how.” 

Matt shakes his head, sweat coming off his hair and flicking onto his own shoulders. So McClane _doesn’t_ think he’s a girl. That’s comforting. “You um, definitely know how to touch me. Like a lot.” 

“Not here,” McClane says, letting his thumb graze below the button on Matt’s jeans, along the line of his erection. 

Matt grins, a huge, million dollar grin, so thrilled McClane is acknowledging that this part of his body _exists_. “You’ve never?” 

“Well sure,” McClane says gruffly, making a face. “Forty some odd years ago. Old dog. New tricks.”

Matt shrugs, suprised, letting go of the terrible strength in McClane’s shoulders to unbutton his pants, pull his dick out with trembling hands. “Well, you have one.” 

“Yeah, but I don’t really think about what I’m doing with it,” McClane says, eyes dropping to watch Matt’s hand as it forms a lazy fist and slides up his length. “Fuck, you look good. Never thought I’d think that, but here I am.” 

Matt tries not to smile like an idiot, but he’s very bad at trying anything right now that requires restraint. So he smiles anyway. Swinging his leg back over McClane’s thigh so he can lie back on the couch, Matt wiggles out of his jeans and jockies so they’re around his knees. “It’s not gonna take much, anyway. Just touch me.” 

McClane leans over him, props himself up with an elbow and spits in his other hand, reaches for Matt’s dick. Then they’re kissing and he’s stroking Matt gentle, not firm enough at all but the wet, rough heat of his hand feels so fucking good and real that Matt’s stomach is already clenching, unwinding in curls of heat. He twists his mouth out from under the kiss to tell McClane “You’re not gonna break me.” 

“Dunno. You’re a skinny kid.” 

“Harder,” Matt urges, voice sounding strained and small and damp between them.

Tightening his fist, McClane jacks him off, thumbing through the precum dripping in oily beads, smearing it across the head. He lets his brow drop to Matt’s chest, cheek scraping along his sternum as he turns his neck to watch himself, his wrist jerking along the length of Matt’s dick. “Look so good,” he repeats, in the same way he confesses secrets. To no one, not to Matt. To the air in the room, to himself, so he knows things are real, so he has a witness to the part of himself even he forgets about. 

Matt’s right. It doesn’t take much. He starts cursing, reaches for McClane’s back so he can get his hands up under his shirt, dragging them along the hot, flickering planes of muscle taut and iron-hard along McClane’s spine, sliding under the skin like something molten. McClane turns his head to kiss Matt’s collarbone, flicking his tongue into the hollow beneath it. And easy as that, Matt is done, making a loud, desperate sound as he arches up off the couch and comes into McClane’s palm, spilling over his fist into his own stomach. 

McClane wipes his hand on Matt’s shirt, which got balled up somewhere near Matt’s head, shoved between flattened couch-pillows and the green sleeping bag. He keeps touching Matt as he shudders through tiny aftershocks, rubbing a hand up his hip bone, his ribs, his neck. “Huh. Not that hard,” McClane finally says, voice rumbling through both of them. 

“Fuck you,” Matt says, not even capable of being disgusted by how overjoyed he is. Fuck all of this, he internally cheers. 

___

They lie there awkwardly, jammed together on the couch with so little room McClane has to be half on top of Matt, heavy and hard to breathe under. Remarkably, Matt is managing, air rattling pathetically in his lungs at he pants, sweat and jizz cooling on his stomach in itchy puddles. He would probably fare better in regards to breathing if McClane stopped touching him. But McClane doesn’t. He’s tracing idle patterns on Matt’s hairy thigh, on the outside of his arm. Matt’s eyes are closed, but he can feel that McClane is studying him, gaze tracing down the lines of his body. “For the log books?” he finally wheezes after clearing his throat. 

McClane grunts, palming Matt from his knee to his hip. He doesn’t say anything intelligible to accompany it, either, just stills his hand for a moment, resting it in the concave dip between Matt’s navel, and the dark nest of curls below it. 

Matt forces his eyes open, tries to let them adjust in the dark so he can try and muddle through the shadows to McClane’s expression. “Are you, um, going to have a straight-guy freak out? Or a cop freak out? Or a, uh, a late middle-aged freak out?”

“What? _No_ ,” McClane grumbles, sitting up. Matt’s whole side suddenly feels cold with the absence of skin, and air rushes into hungry lungs. He reaches for McClane to try and bring him back, a dull panic grabbing him somewhere near his spinal cord and holding on, reminding him of all the things he’s been afraid of, all the loss he predicted. McClane sits at the edge of the couch, pulls his pants on over his ass. “I’m not freaking out, kid,” he finally says. “Just thinking.” 

“I kind of worry that if you think too long, it might turn into freaking out.” Matt might be projecting. His own thoughts are racing. _He_ might freak out. After all, he hadn’t _gotten_ this far into his fantasies. Fucking McClane, kissing McClane, _anything_ beyond strained, almost-painful camaraderie with McClane had seemed, up until this point, a fiction. An impossibility. He thought about it all the time, sure. While he was jacking off, self deprecating. An embarrassingly long list of other, more innocent things, even. But the fiction always ended here. A dream disintegrating into a reality around the words, _doesn’t matter, because it will never happen_. 

But now, here, it _has_ happened. And Matt doesn’t know what to do. He wasn’t prepared for the possibility that McClane might want him too, _certainly_ not prepared for what that meant for them in the future, even the near future. They’re _living_ together, and they just _fucked_. That type of situation usually led to some kind of disaster when ignored. 

Matt’s instinct, of course, is to ignore it anyway. Or, not _ignore it_. But ignore its meaning. He’s thrilled to just keep living with McClane and fucking McClane, as long as he doesn’t have to explain what that means, or acknowledge the potential influence mental illness and trauma might have had on the arrangement. Or, acknowledge his own feelings which may or may not exist outside the influence of mental illness and trauma. He’s read the psychological studies. He knows how these things turn out. They don’t last. 

He sits up too, suddenly feeling vulnerable splayed out on his back like that, sticky and wet and debauched, his pants around his knees. Cheeks burning, Matt puts himself together. “Have you ever, uh, done this before? Not with a guy, I mean.” He coughs, rubbing his palm across the bite marks still stinging on his chest. “I mean...have you ever fucked one of the people you saved?” 

He can hear McClane shifting, the sounds of his palms rubbing together. “Yeah,” he finally says, before drawing in a deep, ragged breath. “Never works.” 

The quiet stretches between them, the inevitability that this is a temporary thing. Matt suddenly realizes that he doesn’t want it to be, but that he doesn’t have the _slightest_ idea how to address that. 

“So I’ve read. In my research.” Matt admits nervously. It wasn’t like he was planning on telling McClane how neurotic he’s been concerning this whole thing, how many _hours_ he’s spent self-diagnosing on the internet. But he also wasn’t planning on _actually_ fucking him in the first place, actually _being_ in a situation where the extent of his thought on this topic might come up in conversation. 

McClane laughs dryly. “You’ve been researching this?” 

“Well,” Matt says carefully, dragging the sleeping bag onto him because he’s cold again and his shirt is balled up and stuck together with come. “Not _this_ , specifically. Surprisingly minimal information out there on the internet. Not, um, in general. Just when I typed ‘wanting desperately to fuck a guy thirty years your senior who saved you from terrorists you accidentally enabled in the ending of the world.’ Not a whole lot of hits.” 

“Hm,” McClane says, a solitary sound in the dark. Matt stares at that dark, able to make out the places where the moonlight filtering in through the kitchen window is reflecting off of McClane: the top of his head, the wide curve of his left shoulder, the veins standing out in stark relief on the top of a hand. Everything else is shadow and small, tired movements. Matt wants so much more. He’s starting to think that he may have had it, temporarily, but not anymore. Not now that they both know what a bad idea it is. 

“But...um, when I researched the emergence of uh...feelings? In situations. Um, situations where there’s trauma, or violence. Stuff I read said it was normal. But usually not, um. Enduring.” Matt hates every single word and pause that comes out of his mouth. He wonders if he could possibly be a more awkward person, or if that additional awkwardness would negate his current awkwardness and he would somehow cease to be awkward, much in the way that two negative numbers make a positive number when multiplied. He rubs a hot palm across his already hot face, feeling positively crawling with heat. 

McClane sighs deeply. “That’s been my experience. Things shouldn’t be different with you.” He’s quiet for a moment, his shadows and highlights very still under Matt’s gaze. The quiet stretches out between them like miles, until McClane adds in an ancient, bitter voice, “But that’s nothing new, I guess. Knew going into this thing you didn’t really want it. Wouldn’t really want it.” 

Matt’s not so sure that this is the case. He thinks of what to say, how to prove that he does want to be here. An old argument, one he’s used to fighting, but never gets better at. He thinks about the certainty with which he _knows_ how badly he wants to stay on this couch, in this house. He thinks about the certainty with which he knows that want is attached not to the couch, or the house, but to the man who owns them. He thinks about how enduring certainty seems, and how he _could_ be wrong. Wrong about everything. How maybe this _is_ how you fall in love, and he just wouldn’t know any better because he’s never done it before. 

“You’re just like all the rest,” McClane says in that way he says things. 

Matt stops thinking abstract thoughts. _What?_ courses across his brain, his familiar resistance to the typical, this other familiar fight to fight. It’s simple. Matt Ferrall opposes being told he he like everyone else. It’s simple, because he’s _not_. He’s not like all the other damsels in distress John McClane has rescued from terrorists. McClane knows this, he knew it when he first kissed him. He said so. Matt’s not like any of them, because he’s _questioning it all_. He’s not throwing himself into it, he’s not taking it for granted, it’s not _assuming_ it’s love. This is what Matt does, what he’s good at. Taking things apart, asking questions, pressing on the bullshit he’s spoonfed by the world so that he can make his own goddamn deductions. Cracking codes. Finding loopholes. Pushing his way in. 

“Um. No I’m not,” he protests, shocked by how even his voice sounds. 

McClane turns to look at him, and Matt wishes badly that he could make out his eyes in dark, that he could decipher the way he’s regarding him. “That’s what they all say,” McClane tells him. “It’s nothing new, kid. I don’t think anything of it. I don’t tell myself it’s going to be different, not anymore. It comes. You know, you do some guy a favor, and maybe you’re confused after it. You want it to mean something more. But it doesn’t. All it means is that you did some guy a favor.” 

Matt shakes his head, unwilling to hear any of it. Because this is the shit he told himself, the shit he’s been _trying_ to tell himself. The stuff that didn’t work, because he’s _not so sure it’s true anymore_. For him, anyway. “But that’s the way it is with _anything_ , any feeling. Feelings come, and then they fade. That’s life. Whether or _not_ you do some guy a favor, people feel feelings and want them to mean something. And sometimes they do, but sometimes don’t, or they change. That’s just a risk of _living_. And you, you can either say fuck it, I’m going to feel what I feel when I feel it and see what happens... Or you can live in fear your whole fucking life and try not to feel anything. Even when you do.” The words slam hard and fast out of Matt, rapid fire and ineloquent. His heart is bleeding up in his mouth, his whole body shivering with cold and the foreign sensation of vulnerability. Laying out words for someone else to take, or leave. Matt feels a thrill with the realization that he has never done this before, and that has to mean something. 

McClane is silent, and for a moment Matt thinks he has him again. That he’s just spoken the million dollar speech and convinced this old, broken, bitter man that these things never last, but _what the fuck does last?_ And isn’t the possibility that it might worth trying for? He waits, mouth open, pulse thrumming and alive. 

“And that’s the difference between you and I. You’re a just a kid. I’m not. I used to think like you, and this is where it got me,” McClane finally tells him, then stands up. 

He’s going to leave. To his bedroom, out the front door, somewhere. Matt panics, throwing the sleeping bag off his legs and tripping after McClane, nearly throwing himself across the table like a bowling ball through wine bottle and candle pins. He grabs McClane’s forearm, and McClane twists easily out of his grip, shakes him off. “Come on, Ferrall. Quit it.” 

“ _No_ ,” Matt says fiercely, reaching for McClane again and this time getting a fistful of his shirt. McClane whirls around, stands to face him and puts firm hands on either of his shoulders, shakes him once, hard. 

“You think you can save me?” he hisses, the bulk of his body blocking out all the moonlight, leaving them lost in the dark. “Then you are different, you’re a bigger fucking fool than all the others,” he snarls. 

Matt shakes his head, his own hair whipping him in the face. “I _don’t_ think I can save you,” he says desperately in a wheezy voice, letting himself be steered aimlessly a few feet backwards, McClane’s weight heavy against him, his hands moving from his shoulders to this throat. Their foreheads touch again, and for a second he fears again that this thing _might_ end in McClane beating the shit out of him after all. “Did any,” he gasps, gritting his teeth, throat burning under the pressure of McClane’s thumbs. “Did any of the others research it?” he finally gets out. 

McClane’s grip loosens minimally, and he lets out a broken, desperate laugh, grinds his brow against Matt’s. “No.” 

“No. They didn’t. But _I_ did. I know what I’m getting myself into, I _know_ it’s unhealthy, and never works or whatever. I know that. I don’t have any illusions. I’m as unsure as you are, I don’t think I can save you, or that you can save me, but right now, you make me feel safe. Right now, I _want to_. And you do too.” 

McClane’s thumb is in his lips again, parting them, sliding third-joint deep into the wet slick of his mouth. He tastes like gun-oil and Matt’s shampoo, Matt’s dick, and his eyes slide shut. He’s not thinking that this can work. He’s not thinking it’s a good idea, or that it will last. He’s just thinking that maybe, because he _knows_ how impossible it is, he might be different. He’s thinking that he doesn’t know what love is, but he doesn’t know what it _isn’t_ either. It could be this. This could be love. 

McClane is holding him at a distance with hand in his mouth, but Matt can feel him crumbling. His grip is weaker, his other hand has moved up to grip in his hair. He would say something if he could talk; he would say _please_. But he can’t say anything because McClane kisses him, drags his wet fingers down Matt’s face to grip his chin and pull him close. 

“I’m not promising you a fucking thing, kid,” he warns, teeth in his kisses. 

Matt lets himself be held up, pressed into the broad, steel-hard plane of McClane’s chest. “Neither am I,” he chokes out, imagining all the places he will be bruised tomorrow, and thinking that he is ready for them. 

___  
Matt stops sleeping on the couch after awhile. It’s not like McClane ever formally _invites_ him into his bed, it just starts to seem impractical that after fucking on those sheets, that Matt should have to walk back out into the cold to his couch with that bastard, smelly sleeping bag. He just stays there one night, naked and bedded down with his laptop and McClane doesn’t tell him to leave.

After that, he ditches the couch permanently. He keeps waiting for McClane to say something or at the very least _notice_ , but the most he ever says about it is the occasional _Move over. For a skinny kid, you sure take up a lot of room_ , or _you took all the covers_ or, the even more occasional _come here_. 

Other things about their routine change, too. Matt actually takes up _cooking_ , for one. He wasn’t planning on it or anything, he’s always been suspicious of shit bearing that “organic” label anyway, and has historically trusted things that come in a can and could therefore survive in a bomb shelter for years. But it just kind of happens. He has so many hours to kill during the day, and his carpel tunnel acts up if he spends all of them on the computer. One afternoon he decides that although he’s allegedly very good at blow jobs (mostly he’s suspicious that McClane has just had very bad luck in the past) but he should probably adopt other helpful skills so that he can supplement the current method with which is is paying rent. Cooking seems easy enough to learn. 

He finds recipes on the internet, goes shopping for canned things and pasta when he wakes up, and buys produce from the Thursday afternoon farmers market two blocks down once he gets really adventurous. He feels ridiculous, and realizes he only knows about two vegetables (both of which come in a can), but McClane calls him houseboy _anyway_. He might as well live up to his namesake. 

The first time McClane comes home to a meal on the table, he is legitimately concerned that Matt is about to tell him some dark secret from his past, and is attempting to soften the blow with spaghetti. _Kid, just spit it out_ , he says, a dark line through his brow, arms crossed. _Like hell you_ ‘just wanted to cook me dinner.’ _I don’t have time for this bullshit. Just say it_. It takes another couple days of Matt’s increasingly better meals to convince McClane that he isn’t lying. He might not be entirely sold yet, but it’s a start. Matt feels like he has time. It’s not like this is going anywhere anyway. If he fails, it will just be sooner than he’s expecting it. He can take a risk. He can keep making spaghetti. 

Both of their sleeping patterns change, too. Not tremendously, but it’s there. McClane stays up later fucking Matt into the night, loses track of time and misses his obscene bedtime by a few hours. Its fair though, because Matt crashes earlier than he has in years; so worn out by McClane’s thorough use of of his body that he just rolls over, soaked in sweat and panting under the weight of McClane’s heavy arm, and passes out. 

Then there’s the Post Traumatic Something or Other. If Matt knew anything about psychology, he would say that his symptoms are improving. That he’s less jumpy, less paranoid. Hell, he’s going to _grocery_ stores again. He’s walking to _farmer’s markets_ and buying _organic shit_. If he knew anything about psychology, he might even say it’s a full 180. But he doesn’t, so he keeps his mouth shut. 

Matt feels like the best way to deal with this whole thing is silence. It seems to be going well, whatever it is. But he wouldn’t dare say so. He just takes one day at a time, noticing minute differences: his heart rate slowing. Some weight gain. The smell of McClane’s sheets changing from aftershave and gun oil to aftershave and gun oil and whatever smells Matt is bringing in, shampoo and toothpaste and sex and his cheap, budget deodorant. Their smells are combining, but Matt would never point it out.

Besides, just because these small details are changing doesn’t mean the big picture is. Matt reminds himself that. He’s still unhealthy. He’s still unsaved, incapable of saving. McClane’s still old and bitter; he still gives Matt as much shit as he ever did. Those are the things that mean something, not the smells and the meals and Matt abandoning the couch, becoming slowly less traumatized. He might want those to mean something, but they don’t. Not yet. 

But then there are times when he wonders. Times when McClane has him on his back with his knees pushed into his chest, calves slung over McClane’s shoulders. Times when McClane’s steady stream of _look so good like this, love the way you feel like this, love the way you take me so hard_ shifts and fragments, splintering into _love the way, love this, love you_ , and Matt’s heart stops, and he wonders. 

There’s the time Matt wakes up in the middle of the night sweating cold and tangled up in the comforter, wheezing and thrashing and on the edge of some wordless panic. McClane wakes up alongside him and is immediately closing in, carding his hand through Matt’s hair before he slides his palm, gentle, sure, firm, across Matt’s stomach. _Hey kid. Hey hey hey. Just a bad dream, I got you._ He kisses Matt’s temple, smooths the skin up his chest, holds him there like that even though he’s got work in less than three hours and should be sleeping. 

Matt’s breath slows, and and he thinks. _Love the way you’re not all fists like I first thought you were. Love that I see this side of you. Love the way you touch me. Love the way. Love this. Love you_. But it’s the middle of the night and he’s not thinking straight, just thinking with his gut, with his heart, which has only just recently slowed. It doesn’t mean anything. He’ll wake up in the morning (afternoon) with a list of reasons why this is happening, why it feels like this. Why it’s not love. 

All things end. Regardless of whether they’re prompted by trauma, terrorists, whatever. According to psychology, those variables just seem to make them end faster. Statistically speaking, anyway. Matt knows this. Or at least he thinks he does.

But with the curve of McClane’s chest snoring soundly at his back, his insides burning pleasantly from being recently hollowed out, Matt reminds himself that he doesn’t know shit about psychology. Certainly not any more than he knows about love. So maybe all he can do is venture forth from one unknown into another, piecing things together along the way. Maybe they’re both crazy people, stuck in the throes of the same post-trauma, hanging onto the only stability they can see in a swiftly rotating world. Maybe they’re just victims to psychology. 

Or maybe, Matt thinks, (because he has always _hated_ the whole evil institution of psychology) maybe this _is_ love. It’s not like he knows any better.


End file.
